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For a short second within the late ’00s, netbooks dominated the low-cost cellular computing market. These had been small, low-cost, low-power laptops, some tiny sufficient to solely have a seven-inch show, and often with extraordinarily limiting {hardware} even for the time. There aren’t very many causes to personal a machine of this period right this moment, since even the most cost effective of tablets or Chromebooks are sometimes way more succesful than the Atom-based gadgets from over a decade in the past. There may be one set of those netbooks from that point with a secret up its sleeve, although: Phoenix Hyperspace.

Hyperspace was envisioned as a manner for these gradual, low-power computer systems to immediately boot or swap between working methods. [cathoderaydude] needed to determine what made this piece of software program tick, so he grabbed one of many solely netbooks that it was ever put in on, a Samsung N210. The machine has each Home windows 7 and a customized Linux distribution put in on it, and with Hyperspace it’s attainable to modify virtually seamlessly between them in about six seconds; successfully immediately for the time.

[cathoderaydude]’s investigation into how bargain-basement {hardware} from 15 years in the past is in a position to do that revealed extra mysteries than it appeared to unravel on the time. At first it seemed like Hyperspace was appearing as a hypervisor, basically supervising the virtualization of each working methods and switching between the 2. However that’s not precisely what was happening right here. Each working methods appeared to share a partition and filesystem, definitely unattainable, and it will definitely he discovered a grasp boot document and file system hidden away on the finish of the drive. From there he was in a position to piece collectively that a number of completely different cases of GRUB had been permitting every kind of surprising issues to occur, successfully mounting each working methods on the identical time to the laborious drive and mapping them each into reminiscence in methods which can be nonetheless not completely clear.

From an out of doors perspective, this appears comparatively much like the invention of the quick inverse sq. root algorithm inside Quake, or this different related (but fictional) state of affairs. [cathoderaydude] admits in the course of the evaluation of those instruments that it looks as if Phoenix created what’s successfully a miracle, by software program requirements, that nobody ended up wanting or utilizing, which was ultimately forgotten to time. And, in case you missed this period in computing historical past, head over right here to see a number of the different issues that had been misplaced from nowadays.

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